Google search king but Yahoo rules mail and content

Stan Beer
Monday, 22 May 2006 19:57

Your IT - Home IT

If one is to believe the latest figures purveyed by online traffic watcher Hitwise, Google continues to reign supreme in the search engine market and appears to be increasing its lead. However, the search engine leader has a long way to go before it can seriously challenge the dominance of Yahoo or even Microsoft in the email and online content stakes.

According to the newly released Hitwise figures, Google has 47.4% share of the search market, which is pushing toward double the combined shares of Yahoo (16%) and Microsoft's MSN (11.5%). However, based on the same set of figures, outside of the search space Google does not seem to have gained much traction at all. Yahoo Mail rules the roost with 42.4%, followed by Microsoft's Hotmail with 22.9%. By comparison, Google's Gmail does not rate, with just 2.54%

Google also does not do well in online news or finance areas, where once again Yahoo wins out easily. In finance, Google, with just 0.29% share is absolutely dwarfed by Yahoo, which has 34.9%, with Microsoft's MSN providing at least respectable competition with 13.4% share. News is more fragmented but Google once again has just 1.9% share compared to Yahoo's 6.3%.

Google also trails Yahoo and US market leader Mapquest in the online maps space.

Despite all of the bad news on the mail and portals front, however, Google continues to make more money and grow faster out of dominating search than Yahoo does through its portals dominance. In 2005, Google had revenues of US$6.138 billion and operating income of $2.017 billion compared to Yahoo with US$5.258 billion and $1.108 billion. As Mel Brooks might say: "It's good to be the search king."